NVidia driver stability?

[Jeremy Messenger]

On Thu, 10 Jul 2003 16:43:34 -0500, Craig Boston <craig at xfoil.gank.org> 
wrote:

> Hi, all,
>
> Just wondering if anyone has had any experiences (good or bad) with the 
> new nvidia driver on CURRENT?  So far I've found it to be pretty 
> unstable...  I tried reverting back to 5.1-RELEASE and recompiling the 
> driver (i'm installing it from the port), but no luck.

On 5.1-RELEASE and old 5.1-CURRENT, I can use NVIDIA's AGP GART Driver 
until one or two weeks ago of 5.1-CURRENT, I am not able to use it any 
longer. It will lock my machine very hard, which only way I can do is turn 
the power off then boot into single to disable it. Current, I am stuck with 
FreeBSD's AGP GART driver (agp.ko) with Nvidia and it works great, but the 
perferomce descrease.

NVIDIA's AGP GART Driver = The glxgears will go over 3600 fps.
FreeBSD's AGP GART driver = The glxgears will go over 2500 fps.

I really have no idea how I can debug, because it only will lock up the 
machine very hard.

============================
nvidia0 at pci1:5:0:       class=0x030000 card=0x88911462 chip=0x028110de 
rev=0xa1 hdr=0x00
    vendor   = 'NVIDIA Corporation'
    device   = 'GeForce4 Ti 4200 with AGP 8x [NV28]'
    class    = display
    subclass = VGA
============================

Note: The problem is same on old and new of Nvidia driver, they both behave 
same.

Cheers,
Mezz

> It works fine in 2D mode, but running GL apps sometimes causes kernel 
> panics.  Running glxinfo and xvinfo repeatedly is a quick way to cause 
> strange things to happen -- segmentation faults, bus errors, and kernel 
> panics.  The backtraces I've gotten are pretty worthless since the panic 
> happens in a completely random place every time (to date, inside the VM, 
> in ATA, USB, and a couple other places but almost never in the NVidia 
> module itself).  Smells like kernel memory corruption to me.
>
> My setup is a PCI Geforce2 MX and a PCI TNT2.  I'm using standard multi- 
> head (NOT Xinerama).  The port is compiled with WITH_FREEBSD_AGP, though 
> it shouldn't make a difference.  I do have an AGP Matrox card in the 
> system, but disabling and/or removing it seems to make no difference.
>
> The only thing slightly strange is that I had to put Options 
> "UseInt10Module" "on" in XF86Config to soft-boot the TNT2.  Otherwise it 
> had a big solid-colored block covering approximately 1/3 of the screen...
>
> Anyway, just curious if this is typical this driver on 5.1 or if it's an 
> isolated problem :)
>
> Craig


-- 
bsdforums.org 's moderator, mezz.